


pretty is an empty word.

by thegoodlannister



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon Non-Binary Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 15:47:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18034541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodlannister/pseuds/thegoodlannister
Summary: on a thursday afternoon, klaus hargreeves falls down the stairs wearing his mom's high heels. he is twelve years old.





	pretty is an empty word.

**Author's Note:**

> this was inspired by a comment over on tumblr that made me realize I had to write this tiny fic, even if everybody else had already done their own version of it.

His first pair of high heels doesn’t belong to him at all. (Maybe Klaus should have realized then that he had a knack for thievery.)

He sees his mom wear them everyday, which makes it easy - always a different pair, in pale, pale pinks and blues like the sky heavy with rain and a nude color that almost matches the peachy tone of her legs beneath her skirt. (Klaus’ legs don’t look that like, and he doesn’t let it bother him. Almost. Mostly. But the way her skirts flair around them makes him wish he knew how that felt.) 

So it’s nothing, one Thursday afternoon, to snatch the pair he hopes everyday that Mom will be wearing, just so he can get to see them. They’re more magenta than red, the color cooler, with a toe that rounds just slightly so it makes his mom’s feet look longer in a good way. Narrower. Klaus likes that. 

Mom is in the kitchen. He can hear her still clearing the plates, and his own feet are very narrow, which he figures must be a good thing, because the shoes fit right over the widest part of them easily, over the knuckles of each of his toes, biggest to smallest. They don’t yet meet the back of his foot; there’s a gap there that makes a  _slippity-slip_  sound with every step he takes as he winds his way out of Mom’s closest, hanging onto the door frame as his center of gravity adjusts - but they’re  _on_ , and the inside is a soft satin that feels like heaven against his skin. Inside them, he wiggles his toes. It’s like dessert without having to eat dinner, he loves them so much. He wants to be buried in these shoes. Forgot the shitty dress shoes Dad makes him wear with his uniform; he’s never taking these off.

As he walks, there’s a clumsy weightlessness to his steps, all 75 pounds of him soaking wet resting on the ball of his foot. Mom makes it look easy, so he tries to extend his leg the way he’s seen her do, so that his calf flexes and holds shape. With each step, the shoe slips forward on his foot and he feels, for the first time, like he inhabits this body more than any of the spirits that visit him at night. 

He wonders if he looks like Mom does, imagines her soft hands on his shoulders, guiding him. In his imagination, she calls him  _‘dear.’_

His next step is surer. And the next after that.

And then, well - then, he guesses that he must have been falling, but Klaus doesn’t remember that part. He’s glad for that, remembers only waking up with a screaming ache in his jaw, his tongue five sizes too big for his mouth. He might be drooling - he can’t tell, with a bright bruise covering one side of his face and wires woven into his teeth, and Dad is there, above him, telling him in a tight voice that he’d better not  _dare_ try opening his mouth, no matter how stupid he is. When he thinks to wriggle his toes, he finds his feet are bare. No one mentions the shoes. They don’t have to.

As the tears squeeze out of his eyes to collect on his nose and his throat tightens around a sound he doesn’t know how he is going to make with his jaw wired shut like this, Klaus leans into the hand Diego lays on the other side of his cheek, the one that doesn’t feel split open, and whines.

"Don’t cry, Klaus, you’ll be okay,” Diego whispers, and Klaus doesn’t believe him. 

He wants his dad. (No, he doesn’t.) He wants his mom. He wants her shoes, on his feet.

He wants, more than anything, to believe that, for the next six weeks, his dad will leave him alone and he’ll be able to snuggle into Allison’s blankets, the fuzzy purple ones she keeps on top of the trunk by her bed, and pretend for a minute he belongs there. That he’ll be able to place her bobby pins in his short tufts of hair and entertain himself with the fashion advice in the magazines Vanya is allowed to have and drink strawberry ice cream through a straw until he can chew again.  

What he doesn’t dare even _want_ , however, is a pair of shoes, heels in spikes, all his own. So when they show up on his bed, he thinks it must be a mistake. They’ve been put there on purpose, though - there’s no doubting that. They come with a tag that reads  _“balance first, stairs later, dear”_ in his mom’s sea-breeze handwriting, and Klaus reads the words over and over as he touches the patent leather, the color familiar, like the shoes might disappear.

When he slips them on, jaw still mending and no chewing for another two weeks at least, they fit Klaus like a glove.

 

_~End._


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